Thursday, February 28, 2008

Comments and Spam

I've been hijacked.

I hardly ever get any comments though I know people are reading the blog, so it was a surprise to see comments on my last three postings. The first one (from Linda) was real. The rest of the comments are all spam.

If you are a legitimate reader please don't click on the links in the comments - they will take you to a dodgy software site which starts loading a so-called spyware protection program without your permission. Ask me how I know! We use a Mac so it was relatively easy to get rid of it, but I suspect a Windows machine might be more vulnerable.

I tried to find a way to report the spammers to Blogger and sent some objectionable content notices. I don't know if anything will come of that. If it keeps up I will disable "allow comments" - reluctantly, because I do like getting feedback, even rare as it is!

2 comments:

Downunderdale said...

hi Joan

You can delete those messages and ban them you know - Dale

aykayem said...

If you go to your "dashboard" thingy and go to "Setings" and then go to "comments", and then scroll down near the bottom - there are a couple of useful things you can do - one is to enable comment moderation, so that you get to see the comments and say yes or no to them showing up on your blog ... I have not bothered doing that, but after I started getting a few of those stupid spam comments I used the thingy under it - I put a dot in the yes thingy for "show word verification" - which is why, if you comment on my blog, you have to type in those weird looking letters you can see - I have not had any spam comments since I turned that on - it stops spammers being able to use computer programs that automatically go to lots and lots of blogs and leave comments - because the computer programs can't read those weird looking letters - LOL
Andrea,
up way too late for someone who has to go to work in the morning ...